Message From The Director
Societies, harnessed with the power of new information and communication technologies, have crossed over into an electronic/digital frontier. It has become commonplace to talk about ‘big data’ as the defining feature of current and future global, digitally-networked societies. Today, not only are questions of public governance and accountability fundamentally connected to the governance of information, but more and more, societies are being managed and governed electronically and digitally by way of informational databases and processes. Every discipline and sector is affected by the increasing volume, velocity, variety and complexity of digital information, and currently, a preponderant amount of research is devoted to analyzing, mining, managing, and monetizing these exponentially growing networks of information. What remains underdeveloped and underfunded, we would argue, is research committed to critically questioning, challenging, and re-imagining the nature and scope of electronic/digital governance and its paradigm of ‘big data’. We welcome all on- and off-campus researchers interested in exploring these issues with us and encourage you to participate in The EGG's activities.
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NEWS AND Events
Dr. Nandita Biswas Mellamphy has published a new article in the international peer-reviewed journal Digital War discussing the expansion of global full-spectrum warfare. In ‘Fuller Spectrum Operations: The Emergence of Larval Warfare’, she argues that we are witnessing the emergence of a distinct construct of digital warfare that exploits non-military weapons and conceptually depends on blurring the strict boundaries between military and civilian domains. Read the full article here.
Call for Papers: 4S Conference, Seattle 2025
The Rotman Institute of Philosophy and the Electro-Governance Group at Western University jointly seek contributions for its open panel, "Masked Conflicts and Cognitive Defenses: Rethinking Security in the Age of Information Disorder" at the 50th 4S Conference in Seattle this September.
Elections have become focal points for public and academic discussions about propaganda, influence, deception, and manipulation in the information environment. These often blur worries about hostile information warfare with general concerns about media and informational dysfunctions. This trans-disciplinary panel explores connections between these two concerns, and conceptions of informational health and security that underlie them.
Our view of ourselves and each other increasingly mediated by opaque sociotechnical systems that shape and structure our sensemaking, and are vulnerable to exploitation. Concerns about cognitive and information warfare waged by adversaries reveal information environments as sites of conflict, exploited by propaganda and information operations, and the co-option of citizens in "participatory disinformation" (Kate Starbird 2019).
These are examples of an emergent form of conflict, distinct from conventional and unconventional use of force, which Nandita Biswas Mellamphy calls "larval warfare" (2025) from the Latin 'masked. This erodes and destabilizes boundaries between combatant and non-combatant, and domestic and foreign actors. War with the adversary becomes war with ourselves. Cognitive security has arisen as a framework for democracies to counter informational and cognitive threats and build societal resilience. However, this is difficult to articulate within narrow vocabularies of security discourse (often in the dialect of national and cyber security) without running into deep tensions with legal norms, with basic democratic ideals, and with the social and institutional preconditions of our social-epistemic interdependence.
This panel engages scholars from humanities, social sciences, and media studies to examine the emergence of larval warfare in relation to ideas of informational, epistemic and cognitive security. What kind of security can this be, for whom, and what conditions foster it? Engagement with these questions is essential if we want to formulate and enact defensive policies that can be effective, non-partisan, and avoid collateral damage to epistemic, social, and political goods.
Deadline: 31 January 2025
Upcoming talk: 'The State of AI and Why Canada Should Not Buy the Hype'
Thursday January 23, 2025, 4-5:30PM,
Room 115, Weldon Library Learning Commons
https://starlingcentre.ca/event/paris-marx-at-western/